Michael Brown, the Superhuman Demon

More troubling is Wilson’s physical description of Brown, which sits flush with a century of stereotypes and a bundle of recent research on implicit bias and racial perceptions of pain. In so many words, Wilson describes the “Black brute,” a stock figure of White supremacist rhetoric in the lynching era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The southern press was rife with articles attacking the “Negro Beast” and the “Big Black Brute,” notes Philip Dray in At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. To the White public, the “Black brute” was a menacing, powerful creature who could withstand the worst punishment. Likewise, in northern papers, it was easy to find stories of “giant negroes” who “spread terror” and rampaged through urban centers. That image never went away; it lingers in crack-era stories of superpowered addicts and teenaged superpredators, as well as rhetoric around other victims of police brutality. “Jurors in the Rodney King beating trial were warned early on that the Black motorist was not on trial,” notes a March 29, 1993 wire story on jury deliberations, “Yet they have heard King compared to a ‘monster,’ a ‘Tasmanian devil’ and a man with ‘hulk-like strength.’ ”

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